Make It Snow: From Zero to Billions

9Advance Your Sales Team

“Chris, you need to triple, triple, triple, double, double.”

—Mike Speiser

A REALLY GOOD startup will achieve a triple, triple, double, double, double in terms of increasing revenue from one year to the next, in its early days. Mike wouldn’t settle for that. We charged customers on consumption, so we didn’t collect revenue when a deal closed. From there, we had to get each customer up and running on Snowflake and using the product to actually realize revenue.

For fiscal year 2016, we booked $3.5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). We more than tripled that for 2017 with $15 million in ARR. We remember someone saying at one of our weekly all-hands meetings: “Holy s–t, how are we going to accomplish that?!” We did. In 2018, we tripled again with $51 million. We did it again for FY2019 with $182 million. That was our triple-triple-triple. Our last full year as a private company, FY2020, we achieved $488 million. FY2021 completed the triple-triple-triple-double-double with $1.2 billion in ARR. We had near-zero attrition for the sales team, which we successfully scaled like no other software company had done in history. Other companies tried and they broke their business. We were moving at light speed, but this thing did not break.

Productivity Model: Amp It up But Soar with Care

Once we received our series D funding in 2017, the board wanted us to go faster on expanding the sales team, faster on targeting new accounts, and faster on closing ...